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This report maps the ecosystem of the burgeoning
‘new’ extreme right across Europe and the US, which is
characterised by its international outlook, technological
sophistication, and overtures to groups outside of the
traditional recruitment pool for the extreme-right. This
movement is marked by its opportunistic pragmatism,
seeing movements which hold seemingly contradictory
ideologies share a bed for the sake of achieving
common goals. It examines points of connectivity
and collaboration between disparate groups and
assesses the interplay between different extreme-right
movements, key influencers and subcultures both
online and offline.

This briefing is the first in ISD’s Gaming and Extremism Series exploring the role online gaming plays in the strategy of far-right extremists in the UK and around the world. This is part of a broader programme on the “Future of Extremism” being delivered by ISD in the second half of 2021, charting the transformational shifts in the extremist threat landscape two decades since 9/11, and the policy strategies required to counter the next generation of extremist threats. The series will include reports exploring extremist activity on four gaming-related platforms: Steam, Discord, DLive and Twitch.

From a technical standpoint, Islamic State (IS) videos are demonstrably superior to those of other groups. But as time goes by, their aesthetic is migrating downstream as other groups attempt to copy it. Specifically, IS has turned to video games, regularly mimicking and even directly copying the aesthetic and design of First Person Shooter games, most often Call of Duty, in their videos, and other groups have followed suit. This specific aesthetic offers a way to recruit young, technologically savvy, men while sanitizing the violence they were being recruited to participate in. This study offers an instrument for tracking the IS aesthetic as it moves to other groups as well as its evolution over time, and offers a case study of a specific group that has copied the IS aesthetic, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS.)

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

This paper takes the case of the Irish Republican Socialist Movement (IRSM) as the point of departure to discuss how insurgent political movement use Web communications. From mirror sites in Ireland and North America, IRSM supporters regularly use Web technology to relay the group message to a global audience at http://www.irsm.org/irsm.html. The resulting direct media contact gives the IRSM unprecedented access to global civil society. By referring to the IRSM Web site, the types of messages transmitted, the forms of transmission (text, video, audio, e-mail or other), and target audiences (national, global, political elites, media), this paper outlines some of the issues and challenges posed by Web-based anti-government media. The Internet and the Web do not constitute a threat to state power as some analysts suggest but at the same time they significantly alter political communication. The IRSM is a case of “enationalism”, that is, the representation of a place as home to a specific group of people. Unlike traditional nationalism, enationalism is not tied to physical space or territory, but to representation of a network of relations based on a common language, historical experience, religion and/or culture. It is about both memory and future projection of a place as the home for a given group. In this light, new media will likely co-exist with other forms of political communication for some time.

In this report, we present an empirical cross-national study of supporters of right-wing extremists’ (RWE) and Islamist extremists’ (ISE) activities and interactions on Twitter. The study is based on
ethnographic and automatic text and network analyses of data from Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Greek and Norwegian female and male Twitter accounts.